Amusement devices have long been known in the art which provide a plurality of individual components which may be spatially positioned relative to one another to define various preselected geometrical shapes, surface configurations, or the like. A familiar example of this may be seen in the device popularly known as the Rubik's Cube, a representative example of which is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,378,116 to Erno Rubik and entitled "Spatialogical Toy". Yet another such example may be further seen depicted in United Kingdom patent application No. GB2116049A entitled "Manipulative Puzzle" to Wayne Butler. Whereas such devices have gained extensive commercial acceptance, each suffers from its own unique deficiencies impairing their versatility and facility for which they are used.
For example, typically there is no convenient means provided for defining the relative spatial positioning of various components of the puzzles so as to facilitate solution by means of a solution book or the like. Moreover, in order to provide such devices with increased complexity of puzzles, characteristically such apparatus has added increased levels of mechanical complexity to achieve this goal, resulting in undesirable increase in manufacturing costs and the like. Still further, such amusement devices are frequently awkward to manipulate, and further have failed to exploit the wide variety of game possibilities such as the creation of word games or alphanumeric games by capitalizing on the wide variety of relative spatial positions possible between the various component parts and by interrelating such parts in novel manners.
Yet an additional deficiency of many such devices relates to embodiments thereof wherein some form of color coding or the like exists on the outer surface of the manipulated pieces. Typically the outer exposed faces of various puzzle pieces are of differing colors for purposes of forming various preselected color patterns or the like in solution of the puzzles. In many of the prior art embodiments of such manipulative devices, individual colored pieces of the device have planar surfaces which intersect wherein each planar surface must be of a different color. An example of this may be seen in the aforementioned Rubik's cube wherein the corner pieces of the puzzle have three sides which must each be of a different color in order to provide for a cube having six faces each of a different color upon solution of the puzzle. Such requirement for individual puzzle pieces having different colors or other indicators on differing faces of the same puzzle piece have obvious attendant manufacturing difficulties, requiring that the separate exposed faces be colorized in an additional manufacturing step by means of painting, stick-on labels, or the like. Thus, it would be highly desirable, by an appropriate design feature, to provide for puzzle piece segments which, for example, may be molded so that their exposed faces need only be of one color, thereby permitting a one-step manufacturing process for each such puzzle piece wherein it is molded in its entirety of a different colorized plastic.
Still an additional drawback of many such manipulative devices and puzzles relates to the fact that during such manipulation they are silent. Thus, it would be highly desirable to provide for various designs wherein some form of aural indicator simulates the noise or other sound commonly associated with the outward appearance of the common mechanical device simulates by the toy. Thus, for example, it would be highly desirable to provide for such an amusement device which, in outward appearance, simulated appearance of a TV channel changer, a roulette wheel, the knob of a safe or the like, and wherein, more particularly, manipulation of the amusement toy as, for example, in rotation of the safe knob, created a sound mimicking the sounds associated with rotation of an actual safe knob.